RE: More on the Roadless Rule

Steve Brenneis opines:

I can't really tell from this whether it was written by John Gates or by Lloyd Brinson's wife (I can't remember her fist name). It sounds more like Mrs. Brinson except that it doesn't have that hard, "I hate everybody who ever thought about being a Republican" edge to it that her writing usually carries.

If we listen to this we will think that we are in imminent need of getting under cover so chunks of the sky don't hit us. Yes, once again the sky is falling. The Bush administration finally made good on a campaign promise they made during the 2000 election campaign and the predictable liberals at the Journal are having a hissy fit.

A few choice points:

"There is no reasonable justification for the Bush administration's decision last week..."

Of course there is. He promised he would do it five years ago. Then he got elected. In our system of government, that's all the justification he needs. The only thing unreasonable about it is that it took this long to accomplish.

"President Clinton instituted the so-called roadless rule that Bush has now scrapped after a painstaking three-year process."

What a pant-load. Slick Willy vacillated on this for three years and then signed the order eight days before he left office. His efforts were just another in a huge series of political triangulations.

"There might also be ill will among some governors, who will have to wade through a new layer of red tape and petition the Forest Service to protect national forests."

Awww. The poor babies. Like they have no other bureaucratic red tape to wade through. Some of it they even created themselves. Spare me! This is such a pitifully weak argument, I would have been embarrassed to make it.

"Scrapping it amounts to taking a giant step backward into the time before Americans understood the importance of the dwindling wild places."

Wrong. Scrapping it means the people closest to the issue get to make the decision. Brinson/Gates wants to make the reader believe that because Bush negated Clinton's (unconstitutional) order, that the bulldozers and paving machines are headed in right now. Typical environmentalist hyperbole. I couldn't be happier about this since it represents one of the few times George W. Bush has actually acted like a Republican in the last five years. My only question is, what took him so long?